Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Yasnaya Polyana Award announced 2012 winners today: Evgenii
Kasimov won the “XXI Century” award for his story collection Назовите меня Христофором (Call Me Christopher) and Andrei Dmitriev
received the first-ever “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” award for Крестьянин и тинейджер (The
Peasant and the Teenager), a book that’s also on the Booker and Big Book short
lists. Valentin Rasputin won the “Contemporary Classic” award. I listed Yasnaya
Polyana finalists in
this previous post.

The other Rasputin:Valentin

I still know close to nothing about Kasimov and his book,
though I’ve already seen bits of (the inevitable!) grumbling about his win. (Kasimov is in politics.) Edit on October 11: The plot thickens... Lenta.ru reports that Iurii Buida claimed, in a Facebook post, that he would have won the prize for Blue Blood (previous post) had he been able to attend the award ceremony; Lenta also reported that Vladimir Tolstoy, the jury chair, claims Buida never got any official notification from the jury.

I’ve heard mixed reactions to Dmitriev’s book—inevitable, too, of course, for a
book on so many short lists—which I’m looking forward to starting soon.
Finally, I’ve read very, very little of Rasputin’s writing, though I’ve had one
or two of his books on my shelves for years. Several English-language translations
are available, including Farewell to
Matyora and Live and Remember,
both translated by Antonina W. Bouis, and Siberia,
Siberia and Siberia on Fire,
translated by Gerald Mikkelson and Margaret Winchell.

Disclaimers:The usual,
plus I translated a story by Vladislav Otroshenko, a Yasnaya Polyana jury
member.